


Children, Go Where I Send Thee

by Poetry



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Canon Compliant, Community: comment_fic, Gen, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-01
Updated: 2010-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-13 11:45:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are children on Earth stranded far from their families. Friends of the Doctor help them find their way home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Children, Go Where I Send Thee

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Дети, ступайте, куда я отправлю вас](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10429833) by [TheLadyRo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLadyRo/pseuds/TheLadyRo)



> Expanded from this [comment-fic](http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/196291.html?thread=42161603#t42161603). Title comes from one of my favorite songs, "[Jane, Jane](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2HSfKjOKYI)" by Peter, Paul & Mary. Unbetaed, so all mistakes are mine alone.

Donna and Shaun build a children's shelter with the lottery money. They don't want to name it after themselves - what's the point of charity, anyway, if it's just a bloody great advertisement for how much of a saint you are? The building is a friendly shade of blue, a perfect rectangle, and though it's supposed to be called the Open Arms Children's Center, everyone calls it the Blue Box.

Donna works there herself, so she can see with her own eyes and feel with her heart that what she does is making a difference. She lets the children paint on the walls, so the inside of the Blue Box is full of vast murals, all bursts of color and wild cityscapes. She - Donna thinks of the shelter as a "she" for some reason, mad as it is - is filled with visions of London from the children's point of view.

Some of the children are different. They have a deepness to their eyes, or perhaps a shimmering just below the skin. Sometimes they seem to blur when Donna looks at them from the corner of her eye. She pushes these perceptions to the back of her mind and treats them just the same. But they come to her, and her alone, to ask for help. She doesn't know why. There are trained social workers here, former schoolteachers, all kinds of people better qualified to talk to the children than Donna. But the strange ones - they always come to her. When they ask her for help, she doesn't quite know what to say, but she finds herself writing a phone number on the back of an index card and passing it to the child. There are two numbers. Neither of them are proper telephone numbers - too many digits.

One of the numbers compels her to say, when she passes it to the child, "He can take you home, no matter how far." She says it confidently, as if she expects a knight on a white charger to appear and carry the little one home. When she gives them the other number, her voice goes soft, like she's telling some sad secret. "He'll never turn a child away," she says.

Those children, the special ones, always disappear soon after they meet with her. The social workers shake their heads and lament that they're back on the street, poor dears, but Donna never feels sorry for them. Somehow, she knows they're safe.

\---

Jack plays back the message for the fourth time.

"Hi. My name's Rukija. Everyone here calls me Rookie, but that's not my name. I'm Rukija. I'm on Earth, at a place called the Blue Box. There was a lady with fire in her hair who told me you could help. She calls herself Donna." The child's voice falters. "I'm a long way from home. I think my brothers are worried about me." Rukija makes a noise somewhere between a splutter and a cough, and his voice is briefly replaced by a gurgling sound. "If you could hurry - please - my cloak is fading. They'll start to see my true skin. They can't see what I am. Please help me."

Jack covers his wrist strap with his other hand. "I can't save you," he says.

It's a lie, of course. He's fixed his vortex manipulator. He could trace the spacetime coordinates of the call and program a jump to Earth. But the ship he's on now is about to make planetfall, and there are children there too who he could be helping, and on the next planet, and the next. He's just one man, and there are so many lost children.

"I can't save all of you," Jack says.

Rukija said that Donna gave out Jack's number. She must trust him, or she wouldn't have done it. But Donna barely met Jack at all. If there's some part of her, deep down, that trusts him, it must come from the Doctor. The man who said goodbye to him one night in a space cantina lives on in her. That man believes in him.

Jack won't disappoint him now.

\---

Rory tiptoes down the TARDIS corridors, occasionally looking back over his shoulder. It's his and Amy's honeymoon, and he wants to make her breakfast in bed. He suspects, though, that she heard him leave their bedroom, and that she's now following him to see what he's up to.

He passes by the console room on the way to the kitchen. The Doctor isn't there, to Rory's surprise; he's not quite sure what the Doctor _does_ when he's not on an adventure or tinkering with the TARDIS console. So when the phone on the console rings, he hasn't the foggiest idea what to do.

"Amy," Rory calls out. "The phone's ringing. What should I do?"

"Answer it, you plonker!" comes Amy's voice, floating through the corridor from which Rory just emerged.

He reaches for the phone nervously. What if it's the Queen? What if it's his own grandfather? Or Emperor Qualosk from the planet Zefax or something? The phone rings again, a little more insistent, and Rory picks it up. "Hello?"

Amy appears in the console room, still in her nightie, and gives him the thumbs up.

"Greetings." The voice is a child's, but it sounds off, like someone with a voice transformer playing at being a child. "I seek assistance. If - " The voice wobbles a little. "If you care to provide it. I normally wouldn't ask, but no one believes that I don't belong here. I was left behind on Earth, and the humans do not _understand_. It was an accident - the ship malfunctioned - but they say my family abandoned me! Please. There was one human who believed my story, and she passed along your contact. She said you could help anyone find their way home."

For a moment Rory doesn't know what to say. In his experience, the Doctor isn't someone who helps you find your home. He's someone who makes your home a place you don't recognize, drags out the monsters under your cozy bed and shows you they're real. He takes you far away from home and brings you back a different person.

But then Amy leans toward him, her eyes a question, and he thinks of a little girl who lost her family, and the man who gave up his existence so she could have it back.

"Don't worry," says Rory. "The Doctor will help you get home."


End file.
